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0 pointsjwarden1y ago0 comments

What straw man? The assumptions underlying the theory of QF are spelled out cleanly in the original QF paper. The article is just enumerating these assumptions and showing they don't hold in reality.

The numbers in the example are indeed impossible to measure. But QF is claiming *optimality* -- that it maximizes social welfare -- when certain assumptions hold. To show that QF does not maximize social welfare when these assumptions don't hold, it suffices to show a single hypothetical counterexample.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

nkmnz1y ago· 2 in thread

I don't hold any cards in the game - if QF is bollocks, so be it, I couldn't care less.

The reasons why I've commented are:

1) the article does a really bad job at using words that matter to me, like "utility". If any theory – QF or OPs own line of thought – tells me that funding cancer research doesn't have utility for the person funding it, that theory is BS. I don't need a badly made up hypothetical counterexample for this.

2) The author contradicts themselves: "QF assumes that all utility is direct utility, benefiting the contributor only." – but then they go on and calculate the utility of spending money on saving lives not based on the utility of the contributors, because "that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize" (btw, who is "we"!?), but based on some arbitrary made-up value and number of saved lives.

imtringued1y ago

Actually, everything you complain about is highly irrelevant. It can't be overstated how irrelevant your objection is.

> (other than feeling good about those lives being saved, but that’s not the kind of utility we’re trying to maximize).

Your interpretation of this statement is that the contributors have a fixed marginal utility for every single dollar, so that they will consider the situation where they spend $1,000,000 per live saved to be superior to the situation where they spend $100,000. In other words, you're saying that welfare is a veblen good for the donor.

The author makes the argument that the mere act of spending more money to save lives is not the type of utility we should strive for to maximize social welfare.

Your utility in question is not about feeling good about saving people regardless of cost, it's about feeling good about saving people, precisely because it costs money and you personally spent money to do it.

By the way, why is that "your utility"? Why am I putting words in your mouth? Because you're disagreeing with the author and therefore necessarily put yourself at odds with the authors objection to the first interpretation. Hence you must necessarily agree with it, otherwise you're just trolling and that would be uncharitable of me to accuse you of. So, yes, you must have mistakenly chosen the silly interpretation.

nkmnz1y ago

I made you spend a quadratic amount of time on your reply than I did, so maybe you have mistakenly chosen the silly path of QF yourself.

nyeah1y ago

I think I disagree with nkmnz' specifics. But I'm not sure! It's possible I might agree with nkmnz across the board.

This might be a case where someone familiar with the subject could follow what you're saying just fine, but most of us HN commenters don't know enough about the subject to get it. That can happen here (e.g. on physics topics). In any case I can't really follow your arguments closely.

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